School Board Revising Gym Repair Strategy

That’s significantly less than the $8.5 million package of renovations that the school board hired SfL+a Architects to design a year ago. That sum comes from additional money raised from when the county sold bonds for construction of Southern Pines, Pinehurst and Aberdeen elementary schools three years ago.

Those design plans have been completed, but last month the committee redirected the firm to propose a more modest set of repairs that address the buildings’ fundamental problems: leaking roofs and lack of air conditioning.

“While this new scope of work does not reflect any choices that you would make in terms of alternates like getting rid of the boilers, you can still see that it’s pared down significantly from where we were,” Jenny Purvis, Moore County Schools’ executive officer for operations, told the committee.

Those three gyms, along with those at Carthage, Sandhills Farm Life and Vass-Lakeview, are holdovers from when those campuses served as high schools. The gyms are now the only non-air-conditioned spaces in Moore County Schools.

With the new cost estimates, the school board will explore repairs to the gyms at Farm Life and Vass-Lakeview in the next year or so as well. Board Vice Chair David Hensley, who also chairs the construction committee, intends for the $8.5 million to cover those two projects and go a long way toward building classrooms at Crain’s Creek Middle.

The board is discussing a total renovation or replacement of Carthage Elementary, to include the gym, as part of its long-term facilities planning.

Under the revised scope of work, the repairs to Cameron, Highfalls and Westmoore would not deliver like-new facilities. But they do include adding air conditioning in all three gyms.

Cameron Elementary’s gym would be the only one of the three to get a complete roof replacement. That’s the most expensive of the projects under the new proposal, at $880,000. That figure also includes fixing the building fascia, new gutters and adding roof-mounted air conditioning.

The Cameron and Highfalls projects include the addition of wheelchair accessible restroom facilities that comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Project architect Mahan Kick of sfL+a said that the projects — adding air conditioning and installing more energy-efficient windows — constitute enough of an alteration over and above the gyms’ original function for building codes to require compliance with the federal law.

But otherwise the projects do not include significant interior renovations, leaving some mostly unused spaces in disrepair.

“There is a significant amount of square footage here, but our task was really the gym, the roofs and making sure that we meet the code requirements, so we are not really updating or doing any kind of improvements,” Kick said of the Cameron project.

The proposed Highfalls project totals $530,000 for a partial roof replacement, air conditioning and replacing 22 windows. Highfalls and Westmoore would each be air conditioned with three window-mounted Bard units on each side of those gyms.

Architects recommended only replacing the lower roof over the restrooms and mechanical space at Highfalls’ gym.

“Looking at the existing condition of that roof, the upper shingled roof we actually thought was in decent condition,” said Kick.

“However this lower roof had similar issues and basically rot coming through, air leaks going through the fascia to the exterior, so the number that we have here is to just replace that lower roof.”

At Westmoore, the new proposal includes no roof repairs, only air conditioning and new windows for a total of $425,000. That building already has a pair of accessible toilets. While the low roof over the locker rooms and laundry is reportedly in poor condition, that building has other structural issues and is essentially abandoned except for some storage.

“If you’re not basically addressing this building as a whole, it didn’t make sense to put a new roof over this space,” said Kick. “As we’re trying to really look at a focused approach to this project, it doesn't make sense to spend $150,000, whatever it costs, to fix that roof and ignore all the other issues that are there.”

After the gyms, the school board also plans to start building expansions on campuses that now use modular units as classrooms. Most prominently, Crain’s Creek Middle’s use of 13 trailers in the rear of the school to serve the sixth grade has been blamed in part for disciplinary issues there.

Crain’s Creek’s core amenities — the cafeteria, the gymnasium and media center — were designed for 700 students, but when the school was built in 2010, county leaders decided to construct classrooms for only 450 to cut costs.

The recent countywide redistricting, though, has helped push Crain’s Creek’s enrollment to around 600 students. Tom Hughes, a principal architect at sfL+a, pointed out that recently updated enrollment projections show only higher enrollment from here.

“By 2031, you're going to be outside even the core capacities of Crain’s Creek so it makes a lot of sense to start to go address that,” he said.

Hughes said that building a new 12-classroom wing with restrooms to completely replace the existing modular units would cost about $8.7 million.

Hensley pointed out that adding eight classrooms at $6 million could fit inside the school board’s available capital funding along with the scaled-down gym repairs.

“My goal is to use the savings from these gyms, which appears to be … let’s call it $6 million, and get rid of trailers at one or more schools,” he said.

“For the amount that was previously budgeted for three gyms, we could do all three gyms and we could … get rid of the trailers and build Crain’s Creek out to its core capacity.”

The gym repair estimates provided this week assume that the existing boiler systems would remain in place for heating. But that is one of several areas that the committee plans to review in the next month or so.

Demolishing the steam heating in all three facilities, upgrading the electrical systems and installing heat pumps would bring the total cost for all three projects to around $2.4 million. That would also provide new heating and cooling systems for the cafeterias at Cameron and Highfalls.

That would head off future issues with the boilers at Cameron in particular. Purvis said that the district has $130,000 in pandemic relief funds earmarked to repair leaking boiler lines there. Cameron was also in line for a new $55,000 boiler last fall, but with this project on the horizon that went to Carthage Elementary instead.

“We can spend $250,000 and just air condition both the cafeteria and this additional space and be done with the boiler,” Hensley said. “Or we spend almost as much and end up with window units and perpetuating the boiler.”

The committee also plans to explore bidding out the gym window replacements at Highfalls and Westmoore separately from the rest of the project to see if that work can be done at less expense. Homebuilder Ron Jackson, who serves on the committee as an advisory member, had previously recommended Builders FirstSource to supply and install windows.

Installing a new roof as proposed will eliminate the existing skylights in Cameron’s windowless gym. Hensley said that may also be revisited.

“I don’t think it’s our intention to do the whole project, just to pluck some things out that maybe are pluckable and we save money on,” he said. “I think we all want to make sure that the taxpayers get value, but we don’t want to be stupid.”